Impact of Knowledge Management on Law Firm Performance

Anyone who is interested in my PhD thesis titled "Impact of Knowledge Management on Law Firm Performance - An Investigation of Causality across Cultures" is most welcome to drop me an email and I shall email it to you in pdf format (it is still a 7 MB document, which is why blogger and my webspace refuse it as a single upload)...

There are quite a few things I think that could be of value for anyone in the legal KM environment, who ever had questions along the lines of:

1. Is KM really worth it or should we simply introduce a few pieces of software?
2. How can KM drive fee income?
3. Which features or services labelled KM have an influence on fee income?
4. How can knowledge sharing be incentivized across different regions and levels of tenure?

With my thesis I walked a thin line between a high level performance view and not omitting relevant context and detail. I think it very clearly explains the value contribution of KM in law firms and how this can be steered.

Comments of any nature are most welcome. Here is the abstract for starters:

It is a management truism that you cannot manage what you cannot measure.

To manage knowledge effectively organisations need to understand how to measure their knowledge management performance against organisational goals.

The case study organisation has developed a balanced scorecard, which is used to monitor key drivers for performance within the remit of the knowledge management function, thereby aiming to improve the delivery of value adding services.

The set of cause and effect relationships at the heart of the scorecard - referred to as the success map – is at the core of this research, which aims to investigate if the link between managing knowledge and financial performance really exists and – if it does – how it can be influenced.

By means of analytical methods including regression, correlation and semi-structured interviews the existence of this link is supported by evidence and the success map updated to reflect the relationships among key performance drivers that were positively identified as relevant. The outcome is a model for managing knowledge that can be applied to professional service firms or comparable organisations that are highly dependant on knowledge.

In relation to this model, cultural variations were investigated and found to significantly influence the relevant performance drivers in several regions and countries across the case study organisation. Ignoring these cultural variations was found to carry the risk to base action on deceitful insights.

In addition to this, the analysis of the survey also gave a clear indication of how to
foster knowledge sharing among lawyers of different nationality and levels of seniority.

This thesis provides the empirical evidence for a link between knowledge management and organisational performance.